This article from Economist.com describes mobile phone data collection, focusing on new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas. Possible uses include: gathering personal data like patterns of travel, schedules, contents of text messages, personal preferences, and personal contacts; group data like social groups, traffic movement, and disease spread; and whatever data might be gathered by sensors, which if put inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level, and so on. "More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats."

An example of the potential use of mobiles in disaster relief is the suite of open-source software to share, aggregate, and analyse data from mobile phones developed by Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD). "Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number. The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables 'geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data'....GeoChat has been officially adopted by the six countries which share a border in the Mekong Basin, including Myanmar and Yunnan province in China, establishing a flow of real-time disease data from villages in the region to each country’s health ministry. Authorities can then choose to share this information with international bodies such as America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization. The aim is to enable a quick response to any outbreak of avian flu, cholera, malaria or dengue fever. InSTEDD is helping aid organisations and government agencies deploy its free tools in other countries, including Bangladesh, Peru and Tanzania."

Alex Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts, United States (US), suggests uses for two passive information gathering features: "First, some handsets can capture information about individuals, such as their activity levels or even their gait, using built-in motion sensors. (Modern handsets use these sensors to work out whether to display information in landscape or portrait format.) Second, information from mobile-network operators, which keep track of handsets in order to pass them smoothly from one network cell to another, can provide a high-level view of how people move around. Dr. Pentland’s algorithms can even cluster information from thousands of phones to divide people into “tribes” of like-minded folk. He calls this “reality mining”." Dr. Pentland's company Sense Networks is working with Vodafone, the CDC, and other collaborators to build an early-warning system for modelling and predicting the spread of tuberculosis in South Africa. By monitoring movements of volunteer patients - tracking them to work out the routine terrain of typical TB patients - they hope to then spot potentially infected people in the wider population.

Commercial use of data is advancing also: "Path Intelligence, a British firm, is applying a similar approach to answer more commercial questions. Its FootPath system aggregates and analyses signals picked up from mobile phones as people move through a particular area. The results can be used by planners to optimise the flow of pedestrians through railway stations and airports or to guide the layout of shopping centres. It can determine, for example, whether customers who visit a given shop also visit a rival shop. The same passive method can be used to figure out where best to locate emergency exits, and even to locate clusters of survivors after a disaster."

Combining voluntary contributions of data, which involves the risk of unreliability in reported content, and capturing automatic data may resolve certain issues on privacy while aiming for accuracy. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, New York, NY, US, combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones in a project on water contamination in Bangladesh. An InSTEDD project is trying to assemble a global network to combine "all manner of data sources, from satellite imagery and seismic sensors to field-workers texting from refugee camps." Usman Haqu has an experimental web-service, pachube.com, which aims to patch together sensors and people into a “conversant ecosystem” of devices, buildings and environments. Some scientists feel that more sensors and data tracking will lead to more solutions for such things as predicting the spread of disease, or the locations of environmental hazards. With the ability of people to contribute data through mobile phones, a broader involvement in scientific research and information dissemination (citizen scientists) may result: "amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park."

Nokia, a mobile phone provider and design firm, has a prototype handset with environmental sensors. Dr. Eric Paulos of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, has "already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh. Graduate students in his newly created Living Environments Lab have loaded households with sensors to sample tap water and indoor-air quality. Results are uploaded to a website where participants can compare them with other people’s contributions."

The article concludes that: "For global networks of mobile sensors to provide useful insights, technology firms, governments, aid organisations and individuals will have to find ways to address concerns over privacy, accuracy, ownership and sovereignty."